by Caroline Hagood ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2019
Thoughtful, literary-minded musings on motherhood, art, and the frequent intersection of the two.
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A series of essays that combine musings on motherhood with literary and film theory.
In this collection, Hagood (Creative Writing/Fordham Univ.; Making Maxine’s Baby, 2015, etc.) blends her academic interest in women’s creative works with her personal experience as the mother of two children. The book’s structure borrows from academia, dividing the essays into sections with titles such as “Research Proposal,” “Methodology,” and “Literature Review.” The essays are short—few are longer than a page—but introspective. The author’s focus is on understanding her place in the world, and she often finds her answers in metaphor: “I was obsessed with mixed genre art, and had now become it. What could be more of a mixed genre than a woman with a mini-woman growing inside her?” References to a variety of artists and theorists appear throughout, from philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to film directors Sarah Polley and Jean Cocteau. The essays address such topics as maternal ambivalence (“My emotional center wanted nothing more than to have a second kid and my mental center wanted nothing more than to have my emotional center committed”), Hagood’s writing style (“I want to show you not the explosion but the mushroom cloud”), and her literary ambitions (“If only I could do for motherhood and womanhood what James Joyce did for walking around the city and taking a crap”). They’re full of the minutiae of the author’s thoughts, and this self-focus may exhaust readers at times. At the same time, though, this intensely personal aspect is one of the book’s greatest strengths; the author wisely doesn’t try to draw universal conclusions about motherhood or femininity based on her own limited experience, which allows readers to interpret and apply her thoughts as they see fit. Her well-developed, imagery-laden prose makes the book an enjoyable read, and the essays’ brevity makes them suitable for bingeing, if desired.
Thoughtful, literary-minded musings on motherhood, art, and the frequent intersection of the two.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-934909-58-4
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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